Ever since Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, people have been talking about the “two Americas.” Namely, the working class, poorly educated, white, xenophobic America that voted for Trump and the middle- and upper-class, highly educated, “elitist,” multi-cultural America that voted for Hillary Clinton (and, later, Kamala Harris).
This perception of two Americas—and, indeed, of a “cold” Civil War that is currently being waged between them—is warranted and realistic. America is more polarized than it has been since the 1860s, and there is a very real possibility of the country tearing itself apart (not militarily, I think, but politically, in the same way the USSR erased itself in 1990).
However, I’m not sure we are in a battle between two Americas, per se, as in one between two worldviews. In one worldview, America is under threat of racial dilution, socialist revolution, and religious transgression, all of which will create an evil, perverse America, which its adherents would rather be dead than live in. In the other world view, America is under threat of nascent Fascism, corporatism, kleptocracy, and the climate apocalypse that will inevitably result from all these things.
As usual, the Germans have a much better word for this: Weltanschauung, a term that encapsulates the philosophical and cognitive underpinnings that define a social group or generation (or both). As an English major in the 1980s, I was obliged to read Eustace M. Tillyard’s classic The Elizabethan World Picture, which explores the conscious and subconscious belief system of Britons in the time of Shakespeare. More recently, I read Robert O’Niell’s memoir The Operator, which recounts his years as a Navy Seal fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this book, he describes the weltanschauung of the Afghani locals whom he encountered, some of whom—quite literally—believed in dragons.
Continue reading “What I’m Reading: “A Guest of the Reich””
Ash Clifton, Writer 